LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

The library management system is dead –

long live the library ecosystem

In increasingly complex information landscapes, is it time to stop thinking in terms

of the library management system or integrated library system, or even a ‘library

services platform’ – and instead start talking about an ‘ecosystem’, asks Ken Chad.

Ken Chad (ken@

kenchadconsulting.com, @KenChad) is Director

of Ken Chad

Consulting Ltd.

www.kenchadconsulting.com

18 CILIPUPDATE

THE library management system – LMS (or integrated

library system – ILS in US parlance) is, for most organi- sations, just one part of a wider library systems infra-

structure. Indeed, for many libraries it is of diminishing importance. Pearson College, a new Higher Education (HE) institution, doesn’t even have one. When academic

libraries looked for e-journal solutions or public libraries looked for solutions to manage e-books, they found the

LMS wanting. In the main they employed alternative solu- tions to enable staff to manage and users to discover those

resources. As libraries struggle with the need to manage

a diverse and growing range of print and digital materi- als, so the library systems environment gets increasingly

complex. Trying to deliver those resources in a conven- ient and coherent way to users requires interdependent,

seamless systems. Lorcan Dempsey summed it up in 2007: ‘One of the main issues facing libraries as they work to cre-

ate richer user services is the complexity of their systems

environment. Reductively, we can think of three classes

of systems: 1 the classic ILS [Integrated Library System]

focused on “bought” materials; 2 the emerging systems framework around licensed collections; and 3 potentially

several repository systems for “digital” resources’.

Best of breed

For a while it seemed as if the answer was ‘best of breed’

library system components interoperating together. For

example, new library ‘discovery systems’1 began to sup-

plant conventional Opacs and interoperate with many different ‘back-end’ LMSs. Nearly a decade ago, Andrew

Pace was talking about ‘dismantling’ the integrated

library system:2 ‘XML, web services, OpenURL, OAI-

PMH, and the rapid development and approval of new

standards are the true hope for the ILS. Perhaps we’ll come to call them interoperable library systems, or even integrated library services.’ Interoperability, however,

remained a problem. In 2012, speaking about what he

calls a new generation of ‘library services platforms’,

Marshall Breeding noted that this trend might be beginning to be reversed. ‘As the back-end modern-

ises and becomes more comprehensive itself, and has more hooks into the remote resources, it reintroduces

the opportunity to integrate discovery and back-end

automation.’ 3 As well as the re-integration of discovery services, these new platforms integrate back-end elec-

tronic resource management (ERM) systems, which had been separate applications. For example, the ExLibris

Alma Library Services Platform replaces both the Aleph

library management system and the Verde ERM system.

Let’s talk about an ecosystem

What is going on? Maybe it would be better to stop thinking in terms of the LMS/ILS, or even a ‘library

services platform’ and instead talk about an ‘ecosystem.’4

Looking at the top ten global strategic technology trends

for 2013, Gartner noted: ‘The market is undergoing

a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and

away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches’.5

The report goes on to say: ‘Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured

security. Driving the trend for vendors is the ability

to have more control of the solution stack and obtain

greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment’. This is not

to say the vendor develops and provides all the elements in the ecosystem. Apple is the obvious example here. It

provides a platform for the ‘community’ (including HE)

to develop content and apps which are nonetheless deliv- ered as part of a coherent ‘ecosystem’, over which Apple

exerts considerable control.

An increasingly complex landscape

If this is a trend for technology in general, perhaps it

is no surprise to see it beginning to be reflected in the

library system environment. So what is, or might be, encompassed by a library technology ecosystem? In the

last century, we spoke of ‘stand alone’ library manage-

ment systems and by the late 90s these systems had

become functionally rich, with many ‘modules’ to man-

age different aspects of library management. With the advent of more digital resources, especially electronic journals and the web, things became more complex.

The number of elements or functions covered in such

a systems environment – or ‘ecosystem’ – has grown

September 2013

LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

over the years. In addition to the familiar modules of

the library management system, the library may be

responsible for, and have separate systems to man-

age, electronic journals, e-books, reading lists, archives

and special collections, local digital collections and the institutional repository for research outputs. If public

libraries deliver e-books to users, they do it with a sepa- rate e-book platform such as Overdrive. Quite often this

sits alongside the LMS as a parallel system. The e-book

platform and the LMS may barely interoperate at all.

For academic libraries in particular, library responsibil-

ity has extended into areas of university activity such

as teaching and learning and research. Here they can

apply core skills such as metadata management (cata-

loguing as it used to be known). An institution’s research

outputs (scholarly articles) are often managed in an

Institutional Repository (IR) which, in many cases, is the

responsibility of the library. A new wave of reading list

systems is being implemented in UK universities, partly

with a goal to bring libraries closer to teaching and

learning. In some cases the Virtual Learning Environ-

ment (VLE) also comes under the library’s purview.

And, as primary research data gets more attention, some

libraries are developing a role in,6 and acquiring systems

for, Research Data Management (RDM).

Much of this complex landscape remains one of silos

rather than an interconnected, interoperable ‘ecosys-

tem’. This becomes very apparent when users try to

discover resources. They still have to navigate a number

of systems with different search interfaces and ways

of displaying and describing resources. Even a basic

element such as a ‘name’ may appear differently in the

library catalogue and institutional repository.

September 2013

For academic libraries in particular, library

responsibility has extended into areas of university activity such as teaching and learning and research.

Bringing silos together

Some libraries have managed to bring a number of these silos together under a unified discovery service

umbrella but with only partial success. Harmonis-

ing metadata to provide a single central index across such diverse systems and, from a vendor’s point of

view, across many institutions is not a trivial task. Jisc

recently described the problem: ‘Over the years vari-

ous metadata schemas and models have emerged, but clarity on the best metadata strategy to adopt or how to

achieve interoperability between scholarly systems has

been a hard nut to crack.’ 7 And of course the forego- ing assumes the metadata is available in the first place

to harmonise. Currently there are still battles going

on between content providers and discovery services providers. Some of the former will not allow the latter

to have the metadata to index.8 So it is not yet clear whether ‘more integrated systems and ecosystems’ or

‘loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches’ will win out

although as we have seen, Gartner suggests the former.

Knit me an ecosystem

If Gartner is right, how might a coherent ecosystem

CILIPUPDATE 19

U

LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS develop to knit together the extended landscape of

system silos? As noted above, library resource man-

agement and discovery is becoming ‘unified’ across both print and electronic (primarily e-journal articles)

resources. The manifestation of this is a number of next generation ‘library services platforms’.9 Vendors

clearly have ambitions to extend the ecosystem to digital repositories and digital archives – for example, ExLibris

positions its ‘Rosetta’ product in this way.10 However,

progress remains slow and each ‘silo’ still retains distinct approaches to metadata and, perhaps inevitably, to

workflows. The cross-domain Europeana project has

mandated ‘semantic elements’11 (Dublin Core based) to

bring some order to the field. The problem is recog- nised outside libraries, with Google and other search

services cooperating on a common metadata ‘schema’12

that is gaining attention in the library domain. These

do represent progress but in Jisc’s view: ‘The use of

schemas and also vocabularies associated with particular fields (restricted set of keywords/classifications) has been

patchy at best’.

As institutions work together and share library systems,13 the need for harmonisation of data and work-

flows increases. As technology moves to ‘the cloud’ and as libraries begin to share common cloud-based ‘multi-

tenant’ library services platforms, the opportunity for

a more integrated library ecosystem may grow. Higher

Education is naturally wary of giving vendors ‘control of the solution stack’ so may continue to value a ‘loosely

coupled’ approach, perhaps containing strong elements of open source software and ‘above-campus’ community

services. But in hard economic times, if a vendor-con- trolled integrated ecosystem can deliver ‘lower cost,

simplicity, and more assured security’, as suggested by

Gartner, it may prove very compelling. Certainly public

libraries appear to be less concerned about commercial

vendors running their assets. Seeing the potential for

economies, some have outsourced their entire library

operations.14 Some parts of this article were first published as part of

the Jisc LMS Change programme (http://bit.ly/15gi2Ny).

References

1 See the Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech) website ‘discovery page http://bit.ly/gMguFT

2 ‘Dismantling Integrated Library Systems’. Andrew K. Pace. Library Journal. 1

February

2004. http://bit.ly/17gAt9J

3 ‘ALA Midwinter 2012: From Consumer Electronics Through Post-ILS, Top Tech

Trends

Run the Gamut.’ David Rapp. Library Journal. 22 January 2012. http://bit.ly/w24xzJ

4 Oxford dictionaries: ‘(in general use) a complex network or interconnected system’.

http://bit.ly/1dKUhVG

5 ‘Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013. Analysts

Examine

Top Industry Trends at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo..’. 23 October 2012.

http://gtnr.it/UXRTiL

6 ‘Libraries and the management of research data.’ Martin Lewis in: Envisioning Future

Academic Library Services. Initiatives, ideas and challenges. Sue McKnight (ed). Facet

Publishing. 2010. http://bit.ly/h9Pyqv

7 ‘Tracking research across the fields’. Balviar Notay and Neil Jacobs. Research

Informa-

tion. 7 March 2013.

8 See for example: ‘Discovery silos vs. the open web’. Adrian Pohl. Open Bibliography

and Open Bibliographic Data [blog] 23 June 2013. http://bit.ly/1cax2AG

9 For information on library services platforms see the Higher Education Library Tech-

nology (HELibTech) website ‘next generation’ page http://bit.ly/S4sDed

10 See ExLibris website: http://bit.ly/4cm6my

11 See Europeana ‘Technical Requirements’ http://bit.ly/1ccfG8t

12 Schema.org is an initiative launched on 2 June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo!

to ‘create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.’ http://bit.ly/m3kNgI

13 HE institutions in both Wales and Scotland are investigating shared systems. See

the

Jisc Library Systems programme http://bit.ly/SStGhm

14 ‘List of outsourced and prospective outsourced library authorities’, Public Libraries

News. http://bit.ly/10OtFLk